Abstract
Heritage studies emerged in the wake of the memory boom initiated by David Lowenthal, Patrick Wright, and Robert Hewison in the 1980s. Much of this work was ostensibly in response to the global professionalization of heritage preservation founded in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention. As both a product of late-modernity’s memory crisis and a producer of it, this movement has fundamentally altered how heritage is defined, managed, classified, and experienced in the contemporary world. Previous heritage studies scholarship emphasized the discourse of heritage and the politics of representation, but Rodney Harrison calls for increased attention to the affective qualities of heritage entities and non-Western ontological perspectives. For Harrison, heritage is not merely in the mind or the discourse, but is co-produced through an active interrelation between people, places, and things.
The aim of Heritage: Critical Approaches is to furnish the nascent discipline of critical heritage studies with a new critical framework to inform future studies and better account for this web of affective and agentive connections. Advancing a conception of heritage as emerging from “chains of connectivity” between people, objects, places, and practices, Harrison calls for an ontological shift in heritage decision-making and for democratic representation of non-Western perspectives. Reorienting heritage as such, Harrison means to foster a critical and pragmatic resource for confronting contemporary issues of social, economic, political, and environmental concern.
Heritage: Critical Approaches draws on diverse subfields—from memory studies and material culture to museum studies, archaeology, and tourist studies—to delineate the relationship between various peoples and their heritage places, spaces, objects, and practices. The book reveals a series of crises created by the increasing Euro-American professionalization of heritage preservation that conflict with indigenous and non-Western memory practices. To support his claims, Harrison provides abounding empirical data that scholars can draw from. These include an impressive portfolio of case studies (with images), a genealogy of heritage preservation practices in Anglophone contexts, and an excellent literature review on heritage studies scholarship. Organized into 10 chapters, Harrison first introduces his concepts and framework, provides the genealogy and literature review, and then focuses on his analyses in the second half of the book. It is worth noting that some of the chapters in Heritage: Critical Approaches is a reworking of Harrison’s previous scholarship, but his fresh insights and substantive revisions make this book that much stronger for both the initiated and those who are new to his work.
Harrison’s theoretical perspective draws primarily on Manuel de Landa’s appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory and Bruno Latour’s actor-network framework. This pairing privileges a conception of agency and affect “as something that is distributed across collectives … of human and non-human actors, including plants, animals, the environment and the material world” (p. 32). Through this orientation, Harrison emphasizes the themes of materiality and connectivity as a framework for understanding the network of relations between the global and local, objects and people, places, and practices. The book forward a re-conception of heritage as dialogical that draws from symmetrical models of archaeology and material culture. Symmetrical models aim to detangle the ontological binaries that set apart people and objects, and nature and culture, which found its genesis in the Enlightenment-era Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. This integrated perspective allows Harrison to explicate the transformative interrelationship between humans and material things, and re-conceive heritage preservation as a creative, contingent process of producing the past in the present for the future. Finally, consistent with Laurajane Smith’s (2006) Uses of Heritage, Harrison offers an account of the assemblage of people, institutions, and apparatuses (or dispositifs) within the heritage network to account for the power/knowledge effects at play in the purview of governmentality.
Throughout the book, Harrison refers to the heterogeneous piling up of monumental, iconic, intangible, and quotidian heritage entities on the World Heritage List as a “crises of accumulation.” Resultant of a number of UNESCO definitional and policy changes, the heritage boom in global tourism, and late-modernity’s memory crisis, the crisis of accumulation threatens to render all heritage worthless. Harrison draws on two Australian “indigenous” case studies and one in Marrakech, Morocco, to explicate such definitional and policy changes; he contends that these merely reflect a reorganizing of the universal heritage concept as opposed to a fundamental revision. Due to the crisis of accumulation, “we risk being overwhelmed by memory and, in the process …” our ability to form collective memories and cultural identity is challenged.
Following Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Harrison also considers the connection between heritage, nation-building, and human rights. In the human rights chapter, Harrison looks to post-Communist Croatia and post-Apartheid South Africa as exemplars of implicit systematic racist and social inequalities that can underpin and mask the faux political acknowledgment of diversity in nation-building efforts. Harrison calls for further studies on human rights in such contexts, arguing that multiculturalism and diversity must be actively worked toward rather than merely acknowledged as a part of cultural heritage tradition. This best exemplifies Harrison’s notion of tackling contemporary political and social issues through heritage work. The chapter itself, however, sits uncomfortably with the book’s overall trajectory. The human rights issue is indeed a crisis demanding further attention, but here it does not quite resonate with the “crisis of accumulation” thematic. Bracketing that, scholars should find particular value in the empirical data on the relation between human rights, memory, and nation-building.
Harrison’s scholarly acumen is most evident in his nuanced chapter on absent heritage, spectral traces, and iconoclasm. Through a rapid-fire series of back-to-back case studies, he demonstrates how collective forgetting is equally important to remembering in cultural meaning-making strategies. Here he draws on the Bamiyan Buddhas, the 9/11 Memorial in New York, and the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, plus the Berlin Wall, the Stalin Statue in Budapest, and the relocated Communist memorials in Szobor Park, Hungary. A lack of World Heritage List management has produced a “confusing jumble of memorials and mnemonics, much of which [has] little relevance to contemporary or future societies” (p. 198). As such, a responsible approach to heritage preservation should entail not only preserving heritage entities, but being “brave” enough to “prune” from the list as well. In turn, he suggests a dialogical model of heritage to foreground a democratic ideal of heritage decision-making. This theme is illuminated through a discussion on Australian Aboriginal cultures that highlight the need for an ontological turn in professional heritage practices.
An ontological turn would entail a perspective shift to accommodate indigenous and non-Western worldviews. He suggests a “connective ontology” that views the production of heritage as emerging from the active relation between an assemblage of human and non-human agents, and material and non-material entities. As opposed to merely preserving the past, heritage preservation should be viewed as an “emplaced … future-oriented, emergent, contingent and creative endeavor” (p. 222). This “radical reconceptualization” would require opening up dialogue with “heritage objects, places, and practices in their own right” and their ongoing relationship with indigenous people (p. 221). He borrows Callon et al.’s (2001) “hybrid forum” as an inclusive, democratic, dialogical space.Such a forum would bring together politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and ordinary citizens in heritage decision-making to foster the co-production of “new ways of seeing, thinking and acting in the world” (p. 230). Harrison’s ontological orientation premised on the connectivity of people, places, objects, and practices will find traction particularly with scholars in memory studies, material culture, and those interested in the public sphere. However, the notion of the hybrid forum, while commendable, is not without its limitations.
The hybrid forum is meant to break the “antagonistic bureaucratic divide” and grant more agency in heritage decision-making for ordinary citizens and indigenous populations. Harrison suggests that this “broadens the debate about one about power … to a debate about the future” (p. 229). By eliding the material and symbolic power that necessarily separates these various stakeholders, proponents of the hybrid forum circumvent the essential problem with this more inclusive, democratic ideal. Power relations always already pre-figure who is allowed to speak, where they are allowed to speak, and what they are allowed to speak about. Simply acknowledging or embracing divergent ways of being in the world, non-Western ontologies, and rationalities of the other does not necessarily lend itself to the type of transcendental dialogue that the hybrid forum calls for. Even if the knowledge architecture was re-worked and an indigenous Aborigine could engage politicians or bureaucrats, the likelihood of the latter seeing the world anew strains credulity. In such contexts, the hybrid forum ironically embraces an ideal of consensual rationality that risks oversimplifying discourse, power relations, and communication, while obscuring issues of plurality and diversity. Limitations aside, Harrison’s ambitious agenda is indeed laudable and deserves further consideration toward building a more democratic and inclusive heritage decision-making process.
Heritage: Critical Approaches is a must-have resource for any scholar interested in heritage and memory, material and visual culture, tourism, the politics of representation, and emergent ways of thinking about heritage preservation and memory practices. This book is a wellspring of empirical data and thoughtful reflections based on a strong theoretical and conceptual methodology. I would highly recommend this book for your personal library and look forward to future publications from Rodney Harrison.